He survived things I won’t describe here, because he described them himself, in his own words, in the memoir I helped him publish.
What he survived, he survived for a reason. He believed the country he was fighting for was worth fighting for.
That belief wasn’t naive. He’d grown up in America and understood its failures and its contradictions. He wasn’t blind and he knew the country wasn’t perfect. He believed it was worth what it cost him anyway, and he came home and built a life here and held that view until the end. His story is honest. It contains things that are hard to read. It doesn’t conclude that the country he served wasn’t worth serving.
I’m angry about what’s being done to that story. Not sad. Angry, and there’s a difference. Sad is what you feel when something is over. Anger is what you feel when something is still happening and you can still do something about it.
What is the difference between disagreement and villainization?
Reckoning against indictment, and it’s a chapter of its own near the end.
America has a real history and parts of it are shameful. Slavery happened. The dispossession of indigenous peoples happened. Jim Crow happened. Those failures are real and they belong in any honest account of what this country is, and the book states that before anything else.
What it disputes is an operation that takes those real failures and builds something different out of them. A permanent indictment.
A reckoning names what went wrong and points toward repair. An indictment names what went wrong and declares the whole project irredeemable. The first is history and the second is something else wearing its clothes.
Everything in the book follows from that distinction, and a reader who rejects it will reject the book. I’m fine with that. I’d much prefer a reader who argues with the distinction to one who nods along without ever deciding whether it holds.
The book on this: The Villainization of America argues for the difference between a reckoning that points toward repair and an indictment that declares a country irredeemable, with an appendix of documentation and an invitation to check it.
Who should skip a book about political villainization?
An indictment names what went wrong and declares the whole project irredeemable.
People who have already concluded the country is simply evil. The book states plainly that it won’t help them, because the evidence doesn’t support that conclusion and it isn’t going to pretend otherwise. It’s equally direct about the people running the operation it describes. Some of them believe what they’re saying. Others know exactly what they’re doing. The foreign governments funding and amplifying it know exactly what they’re doing. And it declines to sort out who’s naive and who’s cynical, on the grounds that the distinction doesn’t change the output. What it sets out to document is what the operation is, how it works, and what it’s already produced.
How does The Villainization of America open?
Two sentences in the preface do that work. I grew up in California. I no longer live there.
The California I grew up in and the California that exists now aren’t the same place in any way that matters beyond the geography, and what happened to it is the subject of the book.
I describe watching the process from different angles across decades. As a young man when it was mostly confined to universities and particular neighborhoods in particular cities. Accelerating through the 1990s as an academic structure began appearing in newspapers and television. Then a brief interruption in September 2001. That long observation is the book’s claim to authority. Not expertise in any field it covers, but having watched one thing for thirty years and noticed when it changed.
I’m proud the book stakes its authority there. It would have been easy to dress it up with credentials it doesn’t have, and I think readers can smell that from a mile away. Thirty years of watching one thing is a narrower claim, and it’s one I can stand behind.
How do you organize a book about political division?
Targets, architects, accelerators, cost, and a counter-narrative.
The first part works through what it argues is being attacked. The founding, the military and veterans, religion, capitalism and achievement, the symbols, and the land. The second is the institutions it holds responsible. The academy, schooling, media, culture, politics, legal enforcement, and the corporate and non-profit machinery.
The third part is foreign amplification and where it converges with the domestic version. Then the cost, with data, an interlude of eight documented accounts, and the same question that drives my previous book. That isn’t who caused it but who benefits. Most books like this omit what the last part covers: nations that held, what a selective structure conceals about a larger catastrophe, Americans who refused, and then the reckoning chapter.
| Part | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Targets | The founding, the military and veterans, religion, capitalism and achievement, the symbols, and the land. |
| Architects | The academy, schooling, media, culture, politics, legal enforcement, and corporate and non-profit machinery. |
| Accelerators | Foreign amplification and where it converges with the domestic version. |
| Cost | Data, an interlude of eight documented accounts, and the question of who benefits. |
| Counter-narrative | Nations that held, the larger catastrophe, Americans who refused, and the reckoning chapter. |
Where does The Villainization of America argue against its own examples?
In the chapter on nations that managed a reckoning, before that chapter makes its case. I say plainly that I think the examples in it are only partially correct. Germany is held up as a model of honest reckoning and is failing badly by other measures. Poor demographics, far-right parties rising, and an economy that bought its stability with tax rates most Americans wouldn’t tolerate.
I say plainly that I think the examples in it are only partially correct.Share on X
Most of the European nations presented as success stories paid for that success in ways that wouldn’t translate here. I’m not arguing against the lesson. I’m noting that every example is complicated and that a reader who goes and checks will find the complications. A book that includes its own strongest objection before making an argument is doing something most books in this territory won’t do. If a reader takes nothing else from this essay, that paragraph is the one to weigh.
What does the chapter on the larger catastrophe argue?
That the simplified version makes something enormous look small.
I’ve been interested in the Columbian Exchange since I first read about it, and what draws me is that the full account is true in a way the compressed one isn’t. The argument is that what happened when Europe and the Americas collided wasn’t a unique crime but a compressed instance of something that’s occurred throughout human history wherever isolated populations meet. The same dynamics played out when the land bridge existed between Asia and North America. People migrated and caused enormous damage.
What made the post-1492 exchange different, on this account, was its speed, not its nature.
That’s a contestable position. It’s also an argument, and I wanted it treated as one. What frustrates me about this subject is how quickly any attempt to widen the frame gets labeled denial. That label shuts the conversation down before anyone has looked at the evidence, and readers who disagree with the chapter deserve better than that, and so does the history.
How do you separate documented fact from inference in nonfiction?
By separating what’s documented from what’s assembled.
The chapter before it is numbers. The interlude is what those numbers look like with faces attached, drawn from documented public cases, court records, published journalism and on-the-record interviews.
Two of the eight profiles are named people who have spoken publicly. The remaining six are composites built from documented patterns, combining characteristics representative of the populations the preceding data describes. None of the experiences are fabricated, and the book says which is which instead of letting a reader assume all eight are the same kind of account.
That distinction is more important than it might appear. A composite presented as a case study is a rhetorical move. A composite labeled as a composite is a method.
The book is right to label its composites. Too many books in this territory pass off a blended character as a real person, and when a reader catches it, every true thing in the book loses credibility along with the invented one. The people hurt worst by that trick are the real people the composites were built from.
What does refusing villainization look like?
Not heroic. That’s why a chapter is named for it.
My grandfather refused. Not with speeches or gestures. He refused to let what happened to him become the whole story.
He came home from the camp and didn’t spend the rest of his life defined by it.
He built something. He held opinions about things that had nothing to do with the war. He watched baseball. He talked about ordinary things the way people do when they’ve decided the ordinary things are worth being present for.
He also told the story, when people would listen, and when I listened.
Writing that book with him is what eventually produced this one. That’s a longer route than it sounds and the only one available.
My take
Few books about division argue against their own examples, and this one does. It keeps what’s documented separate from what’s assembled, and it tells you which profiles are composites. I’d hold any nonfiction to that standard. You’ll disagree with some chapters. Good. Disagree with the evidence in front of you, and don’t reach for a label that ends the conversation before anyone looks.
How contested is the argument in The Villainization of America?
Extremely, and both the author and the reader should be clear about that. This is an argument about history, institutions and foreign influence, in territory where informed people disagree sharply about the evidence and about what follows from it. The interpretation here is one position among several, and several specific claims in it are actively disputed.
The book supplies an appendix of documentation and expects to be checked. That’s the correct posture for material like this and the one a reader should take up.
What isn’t in dispute is the thing that produced it. A man came home from a camp, believed the country was worth what it cost him, and couldn’t get anybody to sit still long enough to hear the story. Whatever a reader concludes about the rest of the argument, that’s where it started.
That story is the reason I’m angry. The people who shrink a life like his into a footnote in somebody else’s indictment are doing real damage to him and to everyone who comes after him and never hears why he thought the country was worth it. I’m not willing to let that happen quietly.
Nobody wanted to listen to my grandfather’s prison camp story, because it made them uncomfortable. The Villainization of America is about why the story we tell ourselves matters.
